Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government

Summary

FUNNY.

FRIGHTENING.

TRUE.

It happens to all of us: You're minding your own business, when some idiot informs you that guns are evil, the Prius will save the planet, or the rich have to finally start paying their fair share of taxes.

Just go away! you think to yourself -- but they only become more obnoxious. Your heart rate quickens. You start to sweat. You can't get away. Your only hope is...

...this book.

Glenn Beck, author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers An Inconvenient Book and Glenn Beck's Common Sense, has stumbled upon the secret formula to winning arguments against people with big mouths but small minds: knowing the facts.

And this book is full of them.

The next time your Idiot Friends tell you how gun control prevents gun violence, you'll tell them all about England's handgun ban (see page 53). When they tell you that we should copy the UK's health-care system, you'll recount the horrifying facts you read on page 244. And the next time an idiot tells you that vegetable prices will skyrocket without illegal workers, you'll stop saying "no, they won't" and you'll start saying, "actually, eliminating all illegal labor will cause us to spend just $8 a year more on produce." (See page 139.)

Idiots can't be identified through voting records, they can be found only by looking for people who hide behind stereotypes, embrace partisanship, and believe that bumper sticker slogans are a substitute for common sense. If you know someone who fits the bill, then Arguing with Idiots will help you silence them once and for all with the ultimate weapon: the truth.

The amount of logical fallacies and sourcing follies for ten writers and nine contributors is mind-numbing. Red herrings abound. Implying that the cherry picked comparisons are the only options. The Logic 101 fails are beyond numerous and epic.Even more frustrating is their use of an index format collection of citations at the end - makes fact checking so laborious that I gave up after the second chapter. It took too much to try to figure out what was cited and what was editorial. And a majority of the citations were from blogs and tabloid articles! Some from Beck's own blog... Fact-checking books like these can be a fun exercise that usually counter balances the loss of brain cells suffered by reading them, but they made it too exhausting to get even that little benefit.

He/they were so off base of two subjects I know quite a bit about: energy and health care. I was stunned at the wrong-wing rhetoric. well, not really. And the chapters on unions, presidents, economy, etc... inane and made worse by the perpetual random unrelated ad hominem pop ups saturated with sarcasm. The only chapter that had a semblance of intelligence was on education. Undermined, unfortunately, by his propensity for out-of-nowhere Pelosi-isms.

Disclosure: I thought Beck was an idiot before I read this. Arguing with Himself confirmed my opinion.

I consider myself politically illiterate to an embarrassing extent, so I've decided to do some reading, which I thought would be, uh, not so light. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was not bored when reading this at all! (Except maybe at the end, when he went through all the amendments and made comments about those--my brain shut off.) I was pleased that I understood more than I thought I would, most of it being simple and straightforward. The things he said really rang true to me, and it's an added bonus that he's funny. It also helped that there was an "idiot" in the book asking stupid questions. It was understandable, it was funny, and once you got the gist of what he was saying, it was a little scary. Will be reading more.

We just got assigned this book for our gov't class. Seriously. Well that was fun, I guess. I don't like reading for school, so I went into this book in a bad mood. As always, though, Beck is uproariously funny, and I just got a kick of the fact that he's "required reading" on the college level. Hey, I'm not complaining though. As long as it's not Franken :P

I great read. It's a bit time consuming to read, as it has lots of side quotes and sub readings on each page but it is filled with lots of details and facts from start to finish. Beck backs up all his claims with a long list of citations in the back of the book. Love him or hate him you will be hard pressed to challenge much of what he presents from a smaller government, Constitutional point of view.The book is also quite humorous. Beck has a certain writing quality that makes it enjoyable to dive into a big political read without losing interest.

It is astonishing to me to find myself being the first to list this book and to rate it.Mr. Beck must have a huge staff of busy little bees tabulating so many things as he reports in this book. Reading those numbers even got to be a bit tiresome until one took time off. The cover picture is grossly misleading -- this is a fine mind. He does have an agenda but he seems to have everybody on his radar screen. I would tell anyone and everyone this is worth a read, if for no other reason than to see there are two sides, at least, to issues.